Says Incident Is Occupy’s ‘Tiananmen Square Moment’
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Tuesday, November 22, 2011
Filmmaker Michael Moore blamed the Homeland Security-funded militarization of college campus police for the shocking incident Friday where a University of California police officer pepper-sprayed demonstrators directly in the face, labeling the footage the ‘Occupy’ movement’s Tiananmen Square moment.
“This is not what is supposed to happen in the United States of America,” Moore said. “And the fact that our police departments, now even campus police departments, have been turned into armies – they’ve been militarized mostly through grants from the Department of Homeland Security. And actions like this now are occurring it seems like, every day, all across the country.”
Moore’s warning that local law enforcement bodies are being militarized with the aid of Homeland Security funding is borne out by the fact that police are increasingly turning to tools used against terrorists in places like Iraq and Afghanistan to target the American people, such as Shadowhawk drone helicopters that can taser suspects.
Local police are also now using armored vehicles bought with DHS funds to intimidate protesters. Cops in Tampa rolled out one of the 12-ton tank-like devices recently to deal with a handful of OWS demonstrators.
While the pepper-spraying incident cannot legitimately be equated with the Tiananmen Square massacre, the 1989 tragedy during which the Communist Chinese government killed at least 400 of its own citizens, Moore is right to invoke the image of a Chinese protester blocking a tank in describing the gravity of the footage.
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“This wasn’t a demonstration of 30,000,” Moore said. “This wasn’t a large encampment of 200 tents in Portland. This was just 11 students in a not very well known UC campus. And the images of this have resonated around the world in the same way that the lone young man standing in front of the tanks at Tiananmen Square resonated.”
For the crime of blocking a path, the ‘Occupy’ protesters were treated like victims of a third world dictatorship. Whether you agree or ardently oppose the grievances of the demonstrators, this kind of incident has no place in America. It disgraces the United States’ reputation as a free country on a global scale and only serves to legitimize the brutality of authoritarian regimes abroad.
Indeed, Egypt’s loathsome ruling military junta has already cited the “firm stance” of US law enforcement bodies in dealing with OWS activists as an excuse for the murder of dozens and the torture of thousands of citizens, while renaming their feared secret police apparatus “homeland security”.
If you still haven’t seen the original pepper-spraying incident, watch below.
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Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show.
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